If you were, you know, living your lives, you've probably missed it, but old fires are burning brightly once again: there's somewhat of a falling-out going on between KDE and GNOME, with Canonical siding squarely with... KDE. The issue seems to revolve around GNOME's lack of collaboration, as explained by KDE's Aaron Seigo.

Canonical is one company making one distribution. If you don't like what they do you can switch. GNOME is much bigger and much more influential and not under the dictatorial control of one person. If Shuttleworth wants his personal distro to go in a direction he has merely to point and that's all there is to it. If you want to direct GNOME somewhere you need consensus and support from a majority of developers, at least, if not users.